What Happens When Social Media Weighs The Monetary 'Value' Of Our Posts?

The lifeblood of social media platforms are the flood of content provided free of charge by their users. In many respects, modern social media companies like Facebook and Twitter are merely internet hosting providers, offering free storage space for people to upload messages, music, podcasts, photographs, movies and all other imaginable forms of content. In return, users grant those free hosting providers the right to commercialize and monetize their creations and surrender their right to share in those profits. This free hosting business has become extraordinarily lucrative but as growth slows, a key question will be whether companies begin to curtail the kinds of content they permit.

Looking back, it is truly remarkable that the internet has developed in the way it has. Social media platforms, with their infinite free hosting platforms are particularly interesting in that unlike paid hosting providers, they have to date largely offered almost unlimited hosting at no monetary cost and have made no differentiation between the accounts that generate the most revenue and those that generate almost no revenue.

A viral celebrity posting daily livestreams watched by millions of people and archived for perpetuity consumes an immense amount of computing resources and network bandwidth. That cost is more than recovered through the sale of advertising, the resulting flood of responses that can all be monetized and the underlying behavioral and engagement data captured from all those users.

Celebrities have long been afforded free airtime and publicity in a synergistic relationship with broadcasters and publishers that yielded substantial financial benefits to both.

Social media has expanded this perk to everyone.

While a viral celebrity can yield substantial economic dividends for a social network, what about a reclusive user with no friends or followers who posts a never-ending stream of videos, photos, podcasts and other content consuming hundreds of gigabytes of storage per day but which are never viewed and thus never generate revenue?

To date social networks have never made a distinction between revenue-generating content and non-monetized material.

The viral celebrity and the recluse are both granted the same rights and privileges to post as much as they want.

Making matters worse, social platforms have operated as almost quasi digital archives, implicitly promising their users that they will continue to host everything their users uploaded for all eternity. Other than Snapshot’s explicitly self-destructing messages, no major platform automatically expires content after a fixed period of time to free up disk space.

Social platforms have largely avoided addressing their explosive disk consumption under the assumption that by conditioning society towards unlimited uploading, the steady stream of monetizable diamonds will outweigh the cost of all of the coal dust.

Eventually, however, it is almost inevitable that there will be a great reckoning, much as online retailers have increasingly curbed the sale of content whose shipping costs exceed their desired profit margins.

After all, why should Facebook host tens of terabytes of video for a user whose totality of uploads have generated only a few dozen views over a decade?

Moreover, as the total holdings of social platforms have grown so large that the companies struggle to help their users navigate it all, wouldn’t a smaller assortment of high-value content be better than an endless ocean of low-value posts?

The extreme cost and limited scale of human moderation has strictly limited its application to enforcing terms of service violations involving objectionable content.

As automated moderation becomes tractable and companies begin automatically scanning each piece of content through these algorithms, why not add a few additional filters to each upload?

Instead of just determining whether a post is a terms of service violation and deleting it, why not estimate the post’s “total future monetizable value” (TFMV) and reject it if the algorithms don’t believe it will recoup its hosting costs within a reasonable time horizon?

In fact, it is remarkable that companies have not already begun implementing content expiration policies whereby large files like photos and videos would automatically expire five years after their last access.

Looking to the future, there is a very real possibility that companies will begin considering the economic value of posts before agreeing to host them for perpetuity.

Putting this all together, the social media revolution was based on the implicit agreement by social media companies to act as free web hosting providers that would preserve each uploaded file indefinitely and cover all of its bandwidth and storage costs for the life of the company’s existence, regardless of whether it actually generates any revenue.

In turn, the most popular viral content pays the hosting costs of less-accessed content.

If hosting providers automatically expired content that was no longer being accessed or even outright rejected content it did not see as generating meaningful traffic, the companies could refocus their services on the most profitable social posts, dramatically reducing their hosting costs while providing customers a much richer and more tailored experience that eliminates the deluge of low quality material.

In turn, our online experience would revolve around what advertisers want rather than the most pressing societal concerns, but that is already happening.

As social platforms move ever more aggressively towards AI content filtering, it is critical that as a society we come to terms with an algorithmically moderated world in which it becomes tractable for companies to value every individual post by its economic worth.

In the end, if freedom of speech was replaced with the freedom of economically valuable speech, it would silence a great swath of society.

Though, it seems we are already well on our way towards this Orwellian future.